Sunday, June 30, 2013

NSA Spying: a Class Act

How surveillance works:

[T]he US monitors Germany as closely as it does China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daily, an average of 20 million telephone connections and 10 million internet transactions are collected by the NSA. This is ten times as many telephone connections as the NSA monitors for France, e.g.The NSA does not spy in the same way on the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, who are class 2 partners and therefore are not targets. Germany, the leaked document says, is only a class 3 partner and therefore is also considered a target.

Link. Let's review the bidding. We go easy on "nice" countries like New Zealand and Canada. We go harder on "not-nice" countries like Saudi Arabia and China. Germany--well, old-fashioned Germany was "nice" enough (the ex-Nazis were mostly reformed). But then they took in the East Germany and those East Germans used to run the Stas--oh, right.See also: NSA’s Surveillance Operations the Envy of Former Stasi Commander